Societal Expectations in the Life of an Amnesiac
by May a Chance
Summary: Society has expectations for everything. For one woman, these expectations are abruptly thrown out the window when she loses all of her memory in an accident during her first year of college. With knowledge at her fingertips and nothing holding her back, she is able to change the life she would have lived.


**I was writing a legit story for creative writing and then I realized that I needed a character name so I went with Harper and I didn't mean to start writing fanfiction I swear I didn't but it just sort of happened so what do you want me to do about it? We just got a new teacher for creative writing and she's a college student at the local university who wants to become a teacher so she's actually really annoying and stuck up about most stuff but there you go. We're not allowed to talk to each other because we'll distract others when dead silence is just as bad as a roaring class.**

* * *

 _I speak to the veil  
Between life and death,  
Between order and chaos,  
Between creativity and insanity,  
Between knowledge and memory._

 _This is a thinly veiled line  
A line scarce to be seen  
And it is this line that is defining me._

* * *

For most of her short life, Harper merely accepted society as it was. She was to attend school and gain the knowledge and experience, most importantly the degrees, that she needed to succeed in life. With these things she was to get a good job as a real estate agent or secretary and make money but not too much money since her parents didn't want her to end up more powerful than her to-be husband.

Perhaps when she got married, she would work shorter hours so as to care for whatever children she might one day have.

And Harper was to raise these children exactly the same way she had been raised.

For most of her life, Harper had a full memory of her entire life. She could recall being in preschool and giggling at a clumsy child who tripped over his untied shoelaces as he walked. This recollection continued on with her through life, enabling her to remember who she was and who she was supposed to be. Those were separate entities, though, they almost always were. There was her identity and her parent's inforced identity.

It was the latter that made Harper a bully, one of many prowling the public school system of Las Vegas. If her parents wanted her to be your stereotypical queen bee, then that was what Harper would do.

She only wanted for them to be happy.

At the prime young age of nineteen, though, Harper's perfectly set up life was stolen away from her in an unfortunate incident involving a malfunction in a plane's fuel tank that caused them to plummet through the air before anyone knew what was going on.

When Harper awoke again, she was a cleanslate filled with knowledge but no memory, understanding but no opinions.

The doctors tried to 'console' her with words insisting that her memory would likely return to her, but Harper didn't give a damn. This world was fascinating and oh the way it worked! The way people simply accepted what happened! Wondrous!

She left the hospital with a bit of a concussion and more knowledge and understanding than she could have possibly dreamed of. Ransacking her apartment, Harper discovered the old her, a suppressed girl whose thoughts were suppressed by her want to make her parents proud of her. A particularly long journal entry allowed her to understand that were rather stifling things to have, considering that they pulled one a thousand different directions and didn't seem to care so long as they did well in school.

Looking over her work and report cards, Harper found that she did very well in school. Even if she was a depressed possibly suicidal college student going mad from being forced to fit into society.

And she was in love, very much in love with her high school best friend Alexa.

Her old self held a lot of guilt, she noted. Being a high school pariah apparently meant that she had to bully the heck out of a young genius named Spencer. She scoffed at the idea and eventually came to the conclusion that she would send him an overly detailed, handwritten letter apologizing her previous actions and explaining the change.

Four years following her accident, Harper was a totally different creature ready to burst through the doors of her old high school and apologize to Spencer in person.

The same nine years after, and it wasn't until nineteen years after her accident that the boy she had been so interested in meeting for so long walked through the doors.

And despite all the effort Harper put into avoiding bias and stereotypes, she found herself surprised by the unusually tall auburn-haired man that greeted her. He had a purple scarf, she noted and it was a lovely purple scarf.

"Spencer," she greeted him with a polite smile and an offered hand.

"Harper," he replied and she noticed the contempt under each and every word. He didn't shake her hand, rather bobbed his head twice. Upwards, she noted. He didn't know her.

An awkward moment of silence later, she blurted it out. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry about all those awful things that I did to you in high school and that you had to suffer for me to be like Maria and Emmanuel wanted. I swear I'm being sincere about this and I just really wanted you to know that I'm sorry."

One of his eyebrows crept higher to hide beneath his curly hair. "What caused the change of heart, Harper."

So she told him. Told him about the plane crash and her lack of memories and how she wished that she could change the past but couldn't.

He smiled and wished her good luck with life before continuing off into the reunion.

* * *

" _It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change."  
-Leon C. Megginson_


End file.
